"Let’s go ahead and call it Beto’s 'f***-it phase'"

“He has no fucks to give,” added Jay Surdukowski, an attorney and activist who is one of O’Rourke’s most devoted backers in New Hampshire.

“This feels right to me,” O’Rourke said when I asked him about how he’s currently campaigning when he met with reporters by the stainless-steel beer tanks at Backlash. He said this was “the way politics should be.”…

With this, O’Rourke “broke some glass,” as BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith wrote in his newsletter. In the minds, though, of some Texas political strategists, Republicans and Democrats alike, he did more than that. He might have killed his career, they told me.

“Those words will come back to destroy him should he run for statewide office again,” said longtime Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who’s worked on campaigns all over the country.

“To say, ‘We will take away your guns,’ you know, in this state, in this culture, that’s a no-no,” Steinhauser said.